"The Beta release is the point at which we really want and need the wider
community's help with testing. Beta is a point of much greater
stability in Fedora's development branch, but some fixes continue to
occur to improve usability, performance, and stability. This release is
great for early adopters and Linux enthusiasts! The Fedora 9 Beta boots
on the majority of systems, and gives you an idea of how the final
Fedora 9 will look and feel. Most importantly, we absolutely need
community assistance to check features and provide feedback and bug
reports, to help ensure that Fedora 9 is our best release ever."

"As part of our development schedule, we are releasing a snapshot of
Rawhide in iso and Live form. We are releasing these via bittorrent
only as it is a much lighter weight method to get bits out the door than
to go through our mirroring system."

"As the co-organizers for the North American FUDCon F10, the illustrious
Max Spevack and I are trying to get a handle on our true hotel needs for
the event. To that end, I’ve made a couple changes to the FUDCon
planning page so we can gather information on who needs lodging for the
show."

"Come one, come all, to the brand new Fedora Project's Python SIG's
mailing list. Regardless of whether you are a newbie or a grizzled
veteran, a Sunday dabbler or a hardcore hacker, or merely curious what
this is all about, all are welcome."

"Did you know you can help packagers test updates, give them feedback and
even prevent a faulty package from being pushed into the repositories?
The new Fedora Updates System (bodhi) integrates with the Fedora
Build System (koji) and lets any user give feedback on a specific
update, be it in updates-testing or in the stable repository."

"With all the attention on documentation toolchains in Fedora Docs, I wanted to provide a quick scope on the differences between the toolchain we’ve been using over the years, in /cvs/docs, and the newcomer, publican."

"As mentioned in previous posts, I had an outage on my home Internet connection. With mobile broadband support in NetworkManager being a feature of F9, I figured that I should probably test it. So, I just plugged in my card to my Fedora 9 laptop, and up came "Auto CDMA Network Connection" in the NetworkManager menu, selected it, and just like that, I'm on the Internet at Sprint-speed!"

"In between bouts of fighting one of my broken systems at home, I’m trying to spend some time working on our Single Source Summary page on the wiki. In doing that, and in talking to some other people about the Fedora 9 Beta, I found out that some of our keen new features may not have all the exposure they deserve — one of those is the work our resident ninja master Jeremy Katz has done on persistence for Live images."

"In the middle of the Summer of Code proposals process and it’s been a mixed yet mostly good experience. We still have room for more proposals, so keep helping interested students and encourage them to get in a proposal for Fedora or JBoss.org. We’ll know at the beginning of next week if the student deadline is extended; currently 31 March still stands as the application deadline."

FabianAffolter announced[1] the plans for the upcoming Fedora Ambassador Day being held before LinuxTag. The FAD will be held in Berlin on May 27, 2008. Country overviews have been requested for the meeting. A page[2] has been added to the wiki for additional planning.

FrancescoUgolini has announced[1] the brainstorming session for Fedora 9 release events. This is in preparation for organizing release parties near the Fedora 9 release time. If you have ideas and suggestions for activities at the release parties, please contribute to the Release Events wiki page[2] .

Mike is going to rebuild app2 and stick some of our tg apps on there. Seth brought up an excellent point earlier in that our tg apps aren't really using any x86_64 code but the python objects they create can
be 2-3x larger in memory. Since most of our performance issues with these apps is memory bloat (and ultimate swap) Mike is going to build it as an i686 box, and then compare memory foot prints after a week or two.

The Fedora Art Team leader, MairinDuffy, was interviewed in for the latest edition of the Linux Action Show[1] , a segment about 20 minutes long, covering the status of the Fedora 9 graphics, the team organisation and projects, its relations with the larger Fedora project and with Red Hat and much more. The interview was not very prominent in the Fedora universe and the team busy with nailing the last details of the upcoming theme, so NicuBuculei express his satisfaction about interview's outcome on the list[2] .

MatthiasClasen, from the Desktop team asks[1] about the status of the Fedora 9 art, considering the release schedule and the short remaining time. He is pointed[2] to the wiki[3] , where the graphics resides and final versions have landed for almost all graphics: Syslinux, Anaconda, GRUB, Firstboot, RHGB. Only the desktop wallpaper and the GNOME splash screen (which is not shown by default anyway) needs some more touches.

I ran across a story last week about researchers creating a secure web browser[1] .

It seems there is work being done on a new secure web browser. The authors think that the current browsers suffer from fundamental design flaws that cannot be overcome. The notable thing is that from reading the article it's Open Source software being used. As the current offerings such as XULRunner and WebKit will allow various third parties to easily create niche browsers such as this. While this browser will likely never become a mainstream offering, it is nice that it can fill a hole in the current offerings.